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A Girl’s Gotta Have It

By Kate Phillips September 25, 2006 2:38 pmSeptember 25, 2006 2:38 pm

In the last month or so, since the foiled London bombing plot, we’ve been musing on the lighter side about starting a second career — opening cosmetics counters at the arrival gates of airports all across the country.

A passenger in Boston added her lipstick to a bin of confiscated items. (Chitose Suzuki/Associated Press)

Spending that extra 15 minutes trying to figure out whether pressed powder or a tube of foundation might be confiscated as a gel, a cream or a lotion, was getting a little tiresome. So was preparing dual makeup bags, one for checking, one for carry-on. So was worrying whether our leg bronzer was a solid or a gel. And not carrying around a tube of lip gloss was, well, a little disorienting.

(Yes, we know some items were permitted for carry-on, and yes, we know this is a bit trivial in light of serious airline security issues. But as one female traveler remarked early on, “Since when has blush been mistaken for a bomb?”)

A little pampering might’ve eased the looniness of it all. Imagine stepping off the plane and sliding to a counter for a makeover or a touch-up, just in case someone is meeting you at the gate?
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security relaxed the ban on make-up and other toiletries, announcing that travelers, beginning Tuesday, may now carry on 3-oz. bottles of any gel, liquid, lotion, perfume, toothpaste, as long as they all fit in a quart-size plastic sealable baggie. Good to know.

And we’ll be allowed our water bottles again. That too is a relief, given all the recent attention here in D.C. to the burgeoning population of intersex fish found in the Potomac. Yup, in case you didn’t know, pollution is causing the endocrine systems of fish to go all haywire. The males have developed eggs.

But back to the makeup issue. Maybe there’s a side business now in those trial-size bottles of everything. What, you might ask, does this have to do with politics?

Everything has to do with politics, or vice versa. With so many politicians hopping these days from place to place, think George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, let alone President Bush, the Vice President and John McCain and John Edwards, Mark Warner, don’t they need their toothpaste, their white-smile, and their cake makeup so they can do standups at the airport? We guess Air Force One is exempt, but even so….

And the Transportation Security Administration’s budget being spent sorting through gels, liquids, creams, lotions, etc.? And what did they do with all those confiscated Chanel glossamer tubes? The T.S.A. could recoup a lot of tax dollars by starting its own business, the T.S.A.-stamp of approval cosmetics line. Move over, Sephora.

Still unresolved is better detection of the real bomb-making liquids. Now there’s a stickler. And that is the most important ingredient in any foundation.

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